Plastics & Beyond

00;00;04;03 - 00;00;36;22
Lilian Judy
Welcome to the Plastics and Beyond podcast, an SPE sponsored podcast supporting a diverse, equitable and inclusive workforce. I'm your host, Lilian Judy. And I invite you to join me every month for new, diverse conversations. Now, DEI is a term that is used quite often these days, but what does it mean and why is it so important to educate the plastics industry and other organizations on its benefits?

00;00;37;21 - 00;01;09;17
Lilian Judy
Well, these are some of the answers I aim to provide this season on the Plastics and Beyond podcast. OK, I don't know about you, but I personally do not like listening to podcasts without knowing a thing or two about the people speaking. So I thought a good introductory teaser episode could do just that. Tell you a bit about myself I'm a young black girl, born and raised in Ghana, West Africa, with a degree in plastics engineering.

00;01;10;08 - 00;01;36;11
Lilian Judy
I'm also a huge advocate for women in STEM because I personally believe we need more women in STEM. But on this educational journey, I have challenged many stereotypes. I mean, I'm black and a girl. Now, some of these conversations I'm going to have this season could be uncomfortable to you. Some may be challenging but primarily, I hope these conversations would help to educate you.

00;01;36;26 - 00;02;09;02
Lilian Judy
I am no expert and I am on this educational journey with you all. So on this first episode, I caught up with two amazing SPE individuals, personal favorites of mine, the CEO of SPE, Patrick Farrey, and the chief executive of the SPE Foundation, Eve Vitale. We talked about why she's embarking on this journey, personal experiences they've had, and a whole lot more.

00;02;09;19 - 00;02;15;19
Lilian Judy
So stay tuned Can you tell me a bit about the work you do at the SPE Foundation?

00;02;16;07 - 00;02;47;20
Eve Vitale
Sure. The SPE Foundation is the part of SPE that supports workforce development through student activities. So through scholarships and grants and, you know, educational programs, we're trying to create opportunities for students to understand the plastics industry. Most children and most adults actually don't even know there is a plastics industry. So we take that into the classroom and situations where we're interacting with students, help them understand that and give them opportunities.

00;02;48;03 - 00;02;58;11
Eve Vitale
In recent years, we've added to our mission very specifically that we're trying to create inclusive opportunities for all students in the plastics industry.

00;02;59;15 - 00;03;25;05
Lilian Judy
The pandemic totally shut the world down, and I think it really allowed people to look within, really allowed people to do the work. So even take time to see things that they were probably missing in their everyday life and companies for them to reassess what is important to them. So I know that you have over 15 years of managing societies and associations on this path.

00;03;25;05 - 00;03;45;19
Lilian Judy
Has this ever crossed your mind? Was it something that you were very much aware of? And if not, or if so, why do you think this organization has been one that you feel very passionate about enough to foster these kind of conflict conversations?

00;03;46;16 - 00;04;10;01
Pat Farrey
Many times in my career where I've looked around the board table or looked around if a leadership team or a staff team and recognized that most of the people around the table looked like me in a way, you know, I often felt uncomfortable with that, but I didn't really understand why and I didn't really understand what to do with that.

00;04;11;08 - 00;04;33;23
Pat Farrey
Over the last couple of years, particularly once we brought on board a DEI advisory board, we've created a DEI advisory committee for SPE. That was really where the journey for me personally and for SPE as a company kind of began because it gave me a perspective to look at some of the factors that keep people out of positions.

00;04;34;20 - 00;05;03;10
Pat Farrey
And so understanding that identifying that has made me more aware. I think it's made others in the organization more aware. And not only have we now identified the problem, but we're beginning to put some ideas together on what the path to the solution might look like, too. So we have, for example, the SPE Executive Board is making a real commitment to diversifying the makeup of the leadership team.

00;05;04;06 - 00;05;34;13
Pat Farrey
You know, currently there's we have ten people on the advisory and the executive board, only one person is is a woman. And that just doesn't make any sense. So we're being more attentive to those things. We're creating career leadership opportunities leader leadership training programs to help people be more prepared to assume those positions. We think that over time that that will begin to change So it's been a little bit of a personal discovery for me, to be honest.

00;05;34;17 - 00;05;58;28
Pat Farrey
You know, it's I, I grew up with what I now recognize to be privilege, the privilege of not having to wonder if the color of my skin or my gender is going to impact my opportunities. And so, you know, with that privilege, I think comes some responsibility to support to the path for others OK.

00;05;59;09 - 00;06;10;15
Lilian Judy
And I know you have a background in plastics as well. What has, I guess, your journey being a woman or minority in this space? What has that journey been like?

00;06;11;14 - 00;06;53;22
Eve Vitale
So I came into plastics quite late, was an engineer in the automotive industry for a short time early on and then dropped out of the workforce to raise my kids, came back in through academia and a STEM university, and then got into the plastics industry through SPE with our student chapter, which I helped run at the university. I found it to be very welcoming to me, and yet there tends to be a bias that I have found and I think a lot of it is unintentional or historical in nature.

00;06;53;22 - 00;07;18;21
Eve Vitale
So, so one is we have some younger people that want to come in and take part in activities, and I've had some older gentlemen tell us that we just have to shape them like us. We just have to make them like we are. And I stood up and said, No, we don't. We don't have to make our younger members in SPE like we have to make them into us.

00;07;19;06 - 00;07;44;27
Eve Vitale
We need to welcome them for who they are because they are the future of this society and of our industry and quite honestly, of the world. As a young female engineer in the automotive industry, I saw a lot of bias. I worked in Engines, Power Train for one of the Big Three and was told, was asked, What are you doing here?

00;07;44;27 - 00;08;02;26
Eve Vitale
You should be in seating, picking fabrics because that's what's going to make you happy. So, you know, that was interesting that that's sort of a snapshot of a few of my experiences in industry as a female engineer.

00;08;03;14 - 00;08;30;08
Lilian Judy
I know that women and people of color are heavily underrepresented. How can we be proactive in trying to turn this around or increase the numbers of participation for women and underrepresented people of color in these spaces? Because I think for me, when I was in college, studying plastics engineering, it was hard for me to attend these events because I didn't feel represented.

00;08;30;08 - 00;08;45;05
Lilian Judy
And I think that plays a huge role. So in trying to diversify the industry, we need to target the younger people. We need to target college students who are coming in. So we need to find a way to kind of create a space where they feel welcome so what can we do?

00;08;45;14 - 00;09;27;14
Pat Farrey
You know, unfortunately, this isn't the kind of situation that will change overnight. This, this requires a long term commitment to you know, just to support financially and through programing the people that we want to have in the industry. So, for example, SPE is a couple of programs right now that are looking at that longer term. The longer term impact of this, we have we are funding a series of afterschool STEM programs, particularly in some, some impoverished communities in Detroit, in Florida and out on the East Coast.

00;09;27;27 - 00;10;02;09
Pat Farrey
These programs, we're sending in instructors to help the students have a hands on experience and positive experience in a STEM environment when they haven't had that typically, and to help create for them a vision of what a career into plastics might look like. The vast majority of these kids are from black and brown families there. There's a special emphasis to bring more young women, some girls, into these programs so that we can help create some more gender diversity.

00;10;02;24 - 00;10;31;07
Pat Farrey
And these programs are wildly successful. You know, we had a program through Manner Polymers, one of our great partners down in northeast Texas, they just finished up their school year of an after school STEM program. And I heard the story of a mother who came to the graduation ceremony from this program. Really with tears in her eyes, talking about how her son had never had opportunities like this.

00;10;31;23 - 00;11;05;00
Pat Farrey
No one in their family had ever gone to college. She didn't have the, the understanding of how that all worked. But through exposure to the people in this program, this young Hispanic student now saw a vision of himself in college, and he saw people that looked like him being successful in industry so by creating those kinds of visions, those kinds of opportunities, those kinds of, of a path to success, I think long term, we're going to have a real significant impact.

00;11;05;00 - 00;11;34;08
Pat Farrey
You know, we certainly need to scale those programs. We certainly need more corporate support for those programs. But the structure for it exists and, you know, space that foundation has the tagline. We're, we're changing the perception of plastics. One classroom at a time. And that impact is it's individual. It's on the individual students, but it carries into their families and into their communities.

00;11;34;08 - 00;11;52;23
Pat Farrey
So I don't think to answer your question, I don't think it's a quick fix, but I think investing in those kinds of programs to give early positive experience to students and particularly students from from disadvantaged areas, I think that's where we're going to make the long term impact.

00;11;52;26 - 00;11;54;14
Lilian Judy
What Dusti I mean to you?

00;11;54;19 - 00;12;40;17
Eve Vitale
Look, we'd have to take it apart. Diversity, equity, inclusion. So diversity, I think the thing that most folks who aren't, you know, thinking about diversity, they don't know. They think of diversity as, OK, we need a certain percentage of these kind of people. We need a certain percentage of these kind of people. And they miss the whole idea that by bringing in diverse folks, I mean, diverse, diverse, racially diverse in gender, diverse in sexual orientation, diverse socioeconomic upbringing, diverse in culture, diverse in a, you know, ability, what we gain from that is a team of folks who really can help us understand what the world needs.

00;12;40;17 - 00;13;12;29
Eve Vitale
So I can you know, I know what middle aged white woman in Michigan might want in her world. Right. But I have no idea what a black young man in Detroit needs in his world. So I think when we look at diversity, it means bringing together all of these ideas and people and cultures to, to create a more robust understanding of how we move forward in society, in industry, even in our interpersonal relationships.

00;13;13;26 - 00;13;42;18
Eve Vitale
Equity. For me, I understand equity because as a young girl, I was, I was raised in poverty for about my first 12 years by a single mother in the sixties, which was a real, you know, problem. And I was a girl who was, you know, pretty smart, I would say. And I wasn't given, you know, opportunities to, you know, do what I probably had the ability to do.

00;13;42;29 - 00;14;05;15
Eve Vitale
And so I'm really passionate about bringing opportunities to students who don't have those in their everyday life. Inclusivity, you know, is so important. And I I've seen, I've seen so much hurt and pain when people aren't inclusive with other people, not just at work although that's what we're talking about mostly, but, you know, just out and about in community.

00;14;06;04 - 00;14;30;19
Eve Vitale
And, you know, I've, I've when I was a child, I learned things from people that I cared about that would have created in me a kind of a culture of not being inclusive. And, and it always felt very wrong to my heart. So fortunately, I was able to kind of shake off some of the things that I was taught in the society I grew up in.

00;14;31;08 - 00;14;54;08
Eve Vitale
And I'm on this journey to learn to be more inclusive I think I think we all need to be on that journey as a never ending journey. And I was reading a book today, and there was a really great kind of quote in it said something like, I can't take your journey for you, but I can stand beside you the whole way on your journey.

00;14;54;08 - 00;14;58;27
Eve Vitale
And I think that's a really important thing for us to remember as human beings for each other.

00;14;59;06 - 00;15;34;03
Lilian Judy
I grew up in Ghana, and I grew up in a society that was 97% black, and so transitioning into a society or into a country like America where there's not, it doesn't look like what I grew up as it was. It took a lot of unlearning for me, and I think the pandemic really shifted the conversation, or it really allowed companies and industries to take a step back to see or to try to implement certain things that help the industries reflect what the country actually looks like.

00;15;34;17 - 00;15;51;20
Lilian Judy
What do you think or what do you envision to be some of the toughest parts of this journey? Because I know it's these are tough conversations to have. I know this is not something that is going to happen overnight. But what do you think would be some of the challenges we will face as a whole in trying to get to this goal?

00;15;52;00 - 00;16;17;23
Pat Farrey
I think it begins with good communication I think it's really important that we begin to have the kinds of conversations that will bring these issues more to the forefront. And, you know, just you sharing your personal story, for example, of where you grew up and what that was like growing up in Ghana is a very different experience than mine.

00;16;17;23 - 00;16;57;06
Pat Farrey
So having conversations about things like that, about our diverse backgrounds and where we've all come from and how we got to where we're at today, I think that that enriches all of us and, you know, makes it easier for us to have these kinds of conversations. You know, I hope initially at the beginning of our DEI work there were some I'd call it surprise, I guess, from some of the very long time SPE members that this was that this was an issue that SPE decided to undertake.

00;16;58;08 - 00;17;26;18
Pat Farrey
And as these conversations have continued, I think people are getting more comfortable with the idea that, yeah, you know, we do need to do something here. We do need to create equity of opportunity. We do need to create more inclusion and more diversity in our industry, because it's good for all of us. It's certainly good for the individuals, the families, the communities that are positively impacted by some of our programs.

00;17;27;01 - 00;17;49;05
Pat Farrey
It's certainly good for our companies who are able to, to hire a diverse workforce and create opportunities for them to succeed in those jobs. So I think when, when we look at all of it, it really comes down to just a basic understanding and conversations and recognizing that, you know, what we're doing here is not a negative thing.

00;17;49;14 - 00;18;24;13
Pat Farrey
You know, it's this is not taking opportunity away from somebody to create opportunity for someone else. It's not, it's not a zero sum game. It's it's rising tides lifts all ships. And I think that's really the, the place that we as an industry and as a society are coming to, recognizing that, you know, this is not like some of the failed programs of the past where quotas were implemented or, you know, people were opportunity was taken away from people to give it to other people.

00;18;24;13 - 00;18;51;25
Pat Farrey
This is not that at all. I think this is a much more intelligent, personal approach to just putting, bringing more people to the table, creating those opportunities for us. So being there together. So I think it really comes down to the communication personally and creating some common language, helping us all kind of understand what these principles mean and how they impact our business and our society.

00;18;53;12 - 00;19;16;00
Lilian Judy
Wow. This conversation has been extremely amazing and I can definitely keep talking to my two guests. But as I wrap up the episode, I asked the CEO of SPE Patrick to leave us with one actionable item that our listeners can do in order to create a more diverse plastics industry. And this is what he said.

00;19;17;09 - 00;19;51;20
Pat Farrey
To listen to what the people around us need to think about ways that we can be allies, that we can support people, that may not have the same opportunities that that we have. I've been fortunate in my career to be in some influential positions and I've found that by closing my mouth and opening my ears a little bit more often, it gives me an opportunity to hear those places that we that I might be able to have an impact in.

00;19;51;20 - 00;20;23;29
Pat Farrey
If we all do that collectively, if we all make the commitment to supporting each others career paths to solving injustices or addressing them when they come up to helping people understand how others may feel in particular situations. I think if we do more of that, I think I think in the very short term we'll be able to, to see some real positive impacts of that.

00;20;24;20 - 00;20;46;11
Pat Farrey
So I thank you for your commitment to do this program with us. I think it's important to have these kinds of conversations, to ask these questions, to think about it. And in the ways that you're bringing it forward. And I'm super excited to be part of this of this journey for SPE for our industry. And thank you for inviting me today.

00;20;46;19 - 00;20;55;07
Lilian Judy
Well, I hope you learned a thing or two from this episode, and I will definitely see you all on the next episode of The Plastics and Beyond podcast.